From courtly love to Neoplatonism: keys for reading Cárcel de amor by Diego de San Pedro

Abstract

The current study aims to present a synthesis of didactic content for Medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature teachers focused on Cárcel de amor, a major work of the 15th century which can be read as an amalgam of the love theory trends that were available at the time: courtly love, Petrarchism and Humanistic Neoplatonism at its dawn. Our primary premise is the following: Spanish Cancioneros allowed the configuration of a corpus of texts in which human love begins to expressly employ religious vocabulary. It refers to a series of artificial conventions of the genre, which enclose a reverent attitude towards the realization of pure and perfect love. According to Alexander Augustine Parker, the essential difference between the poetry that chants the sexual pleasure of chivalry love and the poetry celebrating the unfulfilled desire in the courtly love consists precisely in the fact that the latter employs a poetic code that is very similar to the sacred one. Keith Whinnom, for his part, points out to the impossibility of the courtly love philosophy to have been preserved entirely
since the epoch of troubadours.